Why Your Users Are Never Satisfied
Transmission #38 from Jupiter Dispatch
Time: 3.50 Minutes
What is the most dangerous thing you can do, after you brought a successful product to market?
Believe your users will be satisfied with what satisfied them yesterday.
Imagine building something your users absolutely love, only to find them complaining about it six months later.
Nothing changed in your product – but everything changed in their minds.
Welcome to what is called the "Moved Cheese" phenomenon of modern software. (an idea I stole form that old but great business book...)
Here's what fascinates me…
User expectations don't just change – they're on a one-way escalator that only goes up.
Think of how Facebook or other services you used, changed over time. Not because they want to, because they had to.
Let me break down what's really happening when your user adapt to your product:
The expectation escalator: Once your users see something better elsewhere, your "good enough" suddenly isn't. Remember when Amazon introduced one-click buying? Suddenly every other checkout felt like filling out a tax form.
Feature normalization: What was magic yesterday becomes mundane today. The first iPhone camera was revolutionary. Now? If your $200 phone doesn't take perfect night shots, it's "garbage."
Cross-domain migration: User expectations leak across categories like nobody's business. Banking apps are now expected to be as intuitive as Instagram because, well, why wouldn't they be?
Invisible improvements: The better you make something, the less users notice it. Speed, reliability, security – users only see these when they're missing. You'll never get thanked for the server crash that didn't happen.
Tolerance erosion: Remember when waiting 8 seconds for a page to load was perfectly acceptable? Now studies show users abandon sites after just 3 seconds. Your users' patience is evaporating.
Look at your own product through this lens. Are you just maintaining, or are you staying ahead of the invisible expectation curve?
Because the cheese will move whether you like it or not.
Stay curious and keep chasing that cheese.
Your favourite Domi.
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Have an epic time, see you soon for the next Transmission…
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